How to Rip off a Story without Attribution

On the evening of April 30 I notice something moderately interesting - it looks like "Draw Something" has slipped down in the rankings of both best-selling iPhone apps and iPad apps. It has actually dropped out of the Top Twenty in the latter category. This seems to fit the theme of a column I wrote a month earlier, so I bang out a follow-up story. It ain't going to make the Pulitzer shortlist, but there does seem to be extra evidence about something I suspected a month earlier. It looks like Zynga bought OMGPOP literally within 24 hours of when the flagship game "Draw Something" peaked in various mobile app sales charts. Funny, poignant, perhaps relevant to why the share price of Zynga was so soft in April. Next day, on May 1, I publish it at 11.33 AM, hoping to catch some lunch hour traffic.

Cool! The story picks up some steam and hits 2'000 views in less than two hours. More than 30 tweets. Could be worse. And usually is. A few hours later Dashiell Bennett at Atlantic Wire picks up the theme, adds an interesting chart based on App Data information and attributes my story. This is really nice for several reasons. A) Atlantic is a respected, popular website and it is nice to be cited by a major site. B) Dashiell links to my original story twice and actually mentions my name in the column - professional courtesy that feels meaningful after writing dozens of columns that vanish without a trace. C) Links from the Atlantic story boost the views garnered by my story above 5'000 by evening. Better than average and good enough for a small story.

Twinge of jealousy! By the morning of May 2, many sites like BGR.com are picking up the story - and linking to Dashiell's column, not mine. The Atlantic story rises to the top of the list of the most popular pieces on the site. But that helps my column, too - it is now hitting 8'000 views and still getting tweets the day after it has been published, a level of success fewer than 10% of my columns achieve. So what the heck. Dashiell's story had a very cool infographic and it has spawned a real debate in the discussion thread, something I failed to achieve. Everybody wins. Dashiell the most with his 26'000 clicks.

And then - by noon of May 2 - we get to the stage that is familiar to all writers. But still vexing after all these years. Since both my story and the Atlantic piece are "out there", it is time for a major news site to swoop in - and create a story using same data, but without any attribution. This time the honors go to BBC, which cannily uses the same sort of info that Dashiell employed, but without a link to the Atlantic story. BBC anchors its story to "dip of almost five million daily users in the past month" - the very point at the heart of the Atlantic piece. Here's a tip to you kids just starting out at some venerable old news organization - learn how to use parallel sourcing of same or similar data. And phrase your conclusions just a bit differently to avoid overt plagiarism. It's only internet - chances are, nobody notices.

That is how the news cycle turns these days. New media writers tend to be generous with attribution and try to create a series of links in the story to help readers to construct their own narrative. The "old media" is still locked to the pattern of picking up narratives that are "out there" and presenting them as their own. The motives are understandable - many news organizations still believe that attributing other news sources somehow taints or dates a story. Typically, a safe point to swipe a story without attribution is after at least two different sources have handled the theme with different data sourcing.

I would like to think this is a transition period and major news organizations get over their attribution hang-ups sooner rather than later. What is particularly odd about the current state of affairs is that in scientific publications, citing several stories is a must - a sign of anchoring the conclusions to multiple pegs. Why would major news organizations feel that sourcing their stories is somehow beneath them?